On 21st June 1943, the Gestapo raided the house of Dr. Frédéric Dugoujon in Lyon. There they found nine leaders of the French Resistance, including Dr. Dugoujon, Jean Moulin, Raymond Aubrac and René Hardy. Only René Hardy escaped, there and then.

Ironically, and luckily, for Raymond Aubrac, his enemies would have to wait until 1987 before the “testimony” of Klaus Barbie would “identify” him, Raymond Aubrac, as Barbie’s agent. Barbie was a major war criminal. He personally murdered many people besides Jean Moulin and ordered the deportation of 44 Jewish orphans to death in Auschwitz from Izieu in France.

By then the savagery and power of the various domestic political opponents had waned and Raymond Aubrach, unlike Hardy, was beyond the reach of a drumhead trial.

For his part, by the end of his life René Hardy had become enured to the lack of justice for him and people like him; people who had resisted the Germans, who had not sat at home and consequently, being visible, attracted attacks. Often, demands for truth and clarity are cover for hidden motivations.

Careers can be made; interests can be defended and malicious actions hidden, by control of the media or some element of the state. In the case of Raymond Aubrac, it was absurd that the “evidence” against him was the assertions of a duplicitous major criminal with an axe to grind, from whom Aubrac had been lucky to escape once; six degrees of separation is, arguably, insufficient distance from some people.

This writer walked past the Moulin family home in Beziers this August.